in fact, the secret ballot is a latecomer in American political culture. It isn’t really adopted - the first presidential election where the secret ballot is the preponderant mode of voting is 1896, which is also the first presidential…
GROSS: Wow, really?
LEPORE: …First presidential election where some is not killed on Election Day. No, voting in public is far more ancient and more American in that sense. So the whole idea of being a good citizen requires publicly exercising your franchise. So people - you go to the polls and you would - the government didn’t supply a ballot. You would - you know, first you’d have to - first, they were all viva voce. You’d basically be like a caucus. You’d go to the polling place and be like, OK, if you are voting for Smith, stand over here against the butcher’s. And if you’re in favor of Jones, stand over there down by the library. And that’s how the votes were made. And the polls would be counted. That - poll means the top of your head, so people would count the tops of people’s heads, and that’s why it was called the polls (laughter).
So the call to reform public voting, or what was known as open voting, was super controversial because - Massachusetts was the first to do it. And they had this idea that the government would supply these envelopes, and you could bring - so people would start - when the party system got really strong, and newspapers were partisan, like, the Republicans would print a ballot - like, a whole party ticket. It would be, like, we’ll say it’s red. And the democratic newspaper would print a blue party ticket. And so you’d go to the town hall - this is when oral voting had kind of been replaced by paper voting because people were literate. But still, you’d have this giant, long sheet, like a railway ticket, like two-foot long. It would be brightly colored. And so people would try to prevent you from getting to the ballot box and casting your vote. The parties would hire these thugs to go down there. Democratic thugs, you know, would beat up all the Republicans with their blue tickets and prevent them - but people would die.
People were killed every election (laughter) in these incredible battles over trying to get to the - then there was this thing called vest-pocket voting. So this was a little bit sneakier. If you wanted to keep your vote private, you’d fold up your long, you know, blue ticket, and you’d stick it in your vest pocket and try to get to the polls without anybody, you know, knocking you on it. But this was considered unmanly. So when Massachusetts in the 1850s tried to say, well, we’ll just supply envelopes and people can put their tickets in the envelopes before they come to the ballot box, it was repealed because people said that only cowards would use an envelope to vote, you know. So it was a really controversial thing. It takes years for the secret ballot to be adopted, and it’s part of, actually, a lot of forces that are not - people wanted to - didn’t realize there was a lot of corruption as a result. All kinds of party machine nonsense - people are being beaten up, you know, that’s obviously not good. Also, women wanted the right to vote, and they were like, we wouldn’t need to vote in secret. We don’t want to get hit in the head. So suffragists were sort of supporting the secret ballot. And it was first passed in Massachusetts and New York in the 1880s.
But then for years, the only other places that adopted the secret ballot - which is a written ballot supplied by the government to each voter - was the South after Reconstruction because it was a way to disenfranchise newly-enfranchised black men who - none of them knew how to read. I mean, they’d been, you know, raised in slavery, lived their entire lives as slaves on plantations. And so it was - the real success of the secret ballot as a national political institution had to do with the disenfranchisement of black men.
GROSS: So the secret ballot was a way of helping them get the vote.
LEPORE: No, it’s helping - it was preventing them from voting. If you could cut your ballot out of the newspaper, and you’re going to vote a party ticket, and knew you wanted to vote Republican, and that ticket was going to be read, you didn’t have to know how to read to vote. Immigrants could vote. Newly-enfranchised black men in the South could vote. It actually was a big part of expanding the electorate. But people in the North were like, hey, we don’t really like when all those immigrants vote. And people in the South were like, we really don’t want these black guys to vote, so they, in a sense, kind of colluded over - and there were good reasons for the secret ballot too. But they - very much motivated by making it harder for people who were illiterate to vote. It’s essentially a de facto literacy test. And so…
GROSS: Because in the polling place - like, in the election booth - it wouldn’t be, like, code-colored like that, or you couldn’t ask anybody to read it to you. Is that what you’re saying?
LEPORE: You couldn’t - right. And so there’s some counties in Virginia, I think it is, that in the 1890s they print some regular ballots. But then they print ballots in Gothic type - like, deep medieval Gothic type. And they give all those ballots to the black men. It’s a completely illegible ballot. So there’s a very - so anyway, people did - people debated it a lot of the time for those reasons, and also - I mean, if you think about it, why does Congress vote in the open? Well, it could be if you’re a congressperson, your vote should be known to the public. That’s part of transparency that we believe in, and it seems obvious to us. People believed that way about ordinary citizens voting as well for a long, long time. So the caucus in Iowa, that method which is so kooky and kind of fascinating - that’s deliberative democracy. That is a certain kind of exercise of civic virtue that needs to be conducted in public.
GROSS: So I am stunned by everything you have just told me because I thought the secret ballot was one of the principles American democracy was built on. Did you always know this did you find that out later in life?
LEPORE: No, I totally didn’t know. I always have to find things out because I just get curious about them. Remember the election with the Florida ballot - the hanging chad and everything? So I was asked to write a piece about voting machines or technologies in voting because we were looking like we were maybe moving to Internet voting. And I thought, I don’t know if that’s - going from paper voting to Internet voting doesn’t seem that big of a deal, but what’s a really big deal would be going from oral voting to paper voting. I wonder what that was like. And so then I did all this research and realized that, oh, the secret ballot is just such an incredible latecomer. And it’s - the whole story of its origins utterly shocked me, and was really illuminating because it made me think about how Victorian our voting is. Do you know what I mean? It’s like, go in this little booth with a little curtain, and you’ve got to be alone, and it’s going to be dainty and private. It is actually a kind of Victorian domestic, quiet, sacred, middle-class space. And that was carved out by middle-class reformers, you know, against the kind of hurly-burly of, you know, the rowdy, exciting, drunken voting day.